


Microbiology

by gonfalonier



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Closure, Conversations, Mentions of Sex, complicated adult emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 02:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21129353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonfalonier/pseuds/gonfalonier
Summary: Molly, at sixes and sevens after testifying against Jim, just wants to talk to her friend.





	Microbiology

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted more trial, so I made more trial. This is set in the middle of Reichenbach Fall, after Sherlock's abortive testimony but before the rigged verdict.

Inside the cell, a circular interior, no corners to secret anything away. No anything. Nothing but a commode and a sink (no protruding parts; no bolts to wiggle loose) plus a bench for sleeping, and that’s where Jim’s sitting with his elbows on his knees and his cheek in his hand. His eyes are closed. “Ay, me,” he sighs when the guard opens the door for Molly to enter. She hesitates at the threshold: She signed an agreement during visitor intake that released the prison from liability in the case of an incident, but she jumps, she clears the floor, when she steps inside and the door swings closed behind her. When she shakes her hair out of her eyes Jim is standing and his eyes are open and he’s looking directly at her. He says to her, “Hey, you,” and smiles a smile that starts as a smile and then stretches into something else.

Molly’s mum and da, they owned an undertaker’s til they sold it and retired, so Molly knows from death and she knows from fear and body sludge and dissection, and probably hell, to boot. She’s hard to frighten. It takes more than some liar with buttons for eyes to make her shrink.

In the cell there is very little air. She regards Jim silently before she says, “Apologize.” The word is clipped, an imperative, and when it’s finished she tightens her lips right down to a crinkle. She’s made the face at herself in the mirror before and it isn’t a noble one; her mouth looks like a crumpled candy wrapper, but she doesn’t care here. Jim kissed her and kissed her, he kissed her mouth again and again and she used it to say sweet things to him and tell him stories, and she performed oral sex on him and enjoyed it, and every time she did her lips were soft and full, her jaw was loose, her mouth was very easy. He doesn’t deserve her mouth that way now, so he gets it ugly.

“You look cross,” he observes. He gestures to the toilet graciously and says, “Won’t you sit?” But then touches his cheek in faux concern and says, “Where are my manners. You’re a guest. Please, take the settee.” He turns and perches on the rim of the toilet bowl and looks at Molly expectantly. She approaches and sits on the far edge of the bench, out of arm’s way, and she breathes in and out like an icy wind, a cold snap that withers the orchard. She says, “I was humiliated today. Apologize to me.”

Jim’s face falls. He steeples his five fingers and then folds them together. “I am,” he tells her, and his mouth is soft when he says it. _Madam, I swear I use no art at all._ He adds, an afterthought, “Sorry. I am. I wasn’t given a playbook for the other team. I had my man warn them to use a light touch with you, but there’s only so much I can do.”

An itch of annoyance makes Molly sniff. “A light touch,” she scoffs. “I hardly need it. I’m a doctor.” And he leans forward and purrs back to her, “Oh, I remember. You could take it quite heavy.” He straightens back up and shrugs. “Those are just the sort of details I was hoping to spare you from revealing.”

When she sat in the witness box in the courtroom full of murmuring spectators Molly answered questions about the man she’d come to know as Jim from the hospital’s IT department. Funny and hapless, handy, a good listener; she never went to his place, he always came round to hers. The barrister, stately in her wig and robe, drilled down into that, their intimacy. It was embarrassing for Molly to recount how many times, if they were exclusive with each other. The prosecution was forcing her to prove her bona fides -- that she’d experienced more than just five minutes with the man -- and she has no idea if they succeeded, but here in this cell she only feels defamed and unsure. On trial before a jury of herself.

“I found you very brave,” Jim says to her. “For what it’s worth. Honestly, you took your licks far better than i would have.” His eyes scan her from hairline to knee. It makes her sit up straight and prim. He continues, “Knew I made the right choice with you.”

When Molly feels fear it starts in her collar and then moves up like a fingerprint roller into her throat and then down into her lungs. It’s under her chin now and starting to descend. “I’ve never been someone’s choice,” she tells him, and it’s true. She’s never been the subject of pursuit. “Why was I yours?” Consciously, she moves closer to him, just close enough for a fingerhold.

They met the day her password expired and she’d said fuck, and she still had her lab whites on when she knocked on the open door of the IT closet. Jim jumped up to help. Step aside, boys, I’ve got this one.

“You were wide open,” he tells her frankly, with no lilt, no sarcasm. “You make yourself useful, Molls, that’s why everyone uses you.” A silence passes between them in which Molly feels she’s expected to react. He should know better, and without breaking the silence she lets him know. “No?” he says. That fox smile, there it is. Molly remembers it from before, back when he was just Jim, the face he made when she’d say something rude over lunch. He liked when she surprised him. He made that face, that awful little smile, today from the courtroom dock while Molly gave terse and clinical answers to the prurient questions from the prosecution, the side of this battle she was trying to help. He startles her when he speaks again. “I’ll tell you a secret, dearest. You don’t even have to come in close -- if you come any closer, I’ll get a whiff of you and won’t be able to contain myself. You know what i’m like.” She clenches her teeth hard and doesn’t move. She wants to know the secret. He says to her, “I had a good laugh about you. Before you let me in, I told a subordinate about you and we laughed at you. It was all very cruel. We made up a bedroom for you, big flimsy canopy bed, frills all over and pink, oh Molly, we had you living in the Barbie Dream House, it was a riot.” He’s laughing now, with his voice, and she is not. It stings and stings and so do her eyes. He turns his gaze away from her, bored and distracted, while she clutches her own knee hard enough to feel her fingernails printing deep into her skin through the fabric of her sensible trousers. “They gave Barbie so many careers,” he muses. “But we still assume she makes time to cook a low-fat dinner for her husband and give him head even though he’s already smiling all the time, the dumbbell.” 

Molly isn’t looking at him anymore. She’s looking down at the concrete floor as a heavy tear rolls down her cheek toward the corner of her mouth. She can’t see him but she hears him blink, the slides shifting in the carousel, before he continues. “We had you wrong. I did, I got you all wrong.” He pauses and then claps his hands and hisses out sharply, “_Psst._ Hey. Up here, Wedding Bells. Look at me.” When she bolts her head up to see him, he looks angry. He looks angry, but the smile is still there (not on his lips and not in his eyes), because he likes to be scary. She knows she’ll keep forgetting that he’s insane. “I’m giving you a compliment,” he says. “I’m telling you that you’re like me, aren’t I. I’m telling you that you can play-act ordinary and trick the people who like you.”

“I don’t want to trick anyone,” she interrupts him. She sniffles back a sob.

“Death of the author, kitten,” he volleys back lazily. “Doesn’t matter what you want, the result’s still the same, and you like it that way.”

She says to him, and regret burns in her nose, “You have no idea what I like.”

At that, Jim sits back. He pushes himself against the wall, balanced on the place where the toilet’s built in to the cell, and draws his knees up so his heels, in their soft velcro shoes, are tucked inside the rim of the bowl. To Molly he looks like a malicious little imp from a storybook, the kind with sharp teeth who sets traps meant to maim. “You know what, Molly,” he says thoughtfully. “No, I don’t.” Another silence; no tension in this one; full of normal breaths. Two friends in a conversational lull. Jim’s head is tipped back against the wall and his eyes are open when he adds, “I used you the wrong way. I should’ve been recruiting you.”

Molly scoffs, and it earns her a laugh from Jim. “No, that’s right, isn’t it,” Jim says. “You chose the path of the light. you choose it every day. Boring. Exhausting, too. Folks, I don’t know how she does it.”

She’s heard enough. She’s beginning to feel fond of him again, and that isn’t what she wants. She stands; he doesn’t. She says, “Thank you for the apology,” and he waves a hand dismissively. She wants to say something more, something biting that’ll stick with him like a hard slap, but there isn’t anything. It’s impossible to punish him. So instead she says, “I’m not afraid of you.” That makes him smile. He doesn’t answer. Instead he closes his eyes, wets his lips with his tongue, and begins to whistle a high, sustained note.

Molly’s about to call for the guard when he appears at the barred window of the cell door. She looks over her shoulder at Jim’s folded body, his blank face, and she remembers the way they enjoyed each other’s company. It felt sour in her throat to tell the court about the sex they had, but the memories themselves are sweet. Not-sweet. _The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact._ She looks ahead and thanks the guard and squares her shoulders, and she leaves without saying goodbye.


End file.
